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Skype 3D and SLP Raspbian update

A project log for StereoPi - DIY stereoscopic camera with Raspberry

For computer vision learners, drone and robot builders, AR/VR and 360 panorama experimenters. Open source hardware.

eugeneEugene 03/04/2019 at 11:310 Comments

As you know, all our Starter and Deluxe kits will include a microSD card with a ready-to-use Raspbian image so you can repeat all of our livestream experiments right out of the box. We’ve been busy polishing existing features and adding new ones to this image. In this update, we’ll share with you some new features and say a few words about our experiments with Skype and 3D video.

Latest StereoPi Livestream Playground (SLP) Image

You can download image file from one of these three mirrors:

Full descriptions of all features will be added to the SLP section of our wiki in the coming days.

Skype and 3D Video

One of our new features is the ability to livestream MPEG-TS. We used this feature to livestream video from StereoPi to OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) with this OBS-VirtualCam plugininstalled. OBS creates a virtual webcam accessible to Skype. Here’s a proof-of-concept demo, recorded by Sergey:

And here is a screen capture of my iPhone and our first 3D Skype call:

As the iOS screen recorder does not record sounds, I added music to it.

To get all these things to work, we used two tricks. First, we used mic from Logitech webcam connected to the same computer to provide the audio to Skype, since the OBS-VirtualCam cannot emulate a sound device, so sound from StereoPi’s microphone isn’t available to Skype.

Second, we avoid a one-second delay between audio (due to an internal OBS video buffer) by first streaming the video from StereoPi to gstreamer on Windows and then pointing OBS to use the gstreamer window as its video source, which resulted in a delay of only about 100 milliseconds.

This test shows it is possible to use stereoscopic livestream with a lot of common software, like Skype and other video-related programs, all without modification since they already work with a traditional camera.

If you want to discuss more features, please join this thread on the Raspberry Pi forum.

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